


it's a world of everything dying and eating each other right beneath our feet

by liquidblood (honeysparks)



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Canon Divergence, Drama, Emotional Manipulation, F/M, Ghosts, Horror, Mental Instability, Mild Gore, Murder, Occult, Ouija Board, Possessive Behavior, Secret Relationship, Sibling Incest, Sociopathy, Spirits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 13:51:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8847559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honeysparks/pseuds/liquidblood
Summary: Following the altercation between Lucille and Edith & the death of Lucille’s beloved, Lucille Sharpe is unhinged and coming apart when she’s visited by something she’d never seen before, not even in her wildest dreams





	1. goddamn right, you should be scared of me

**Author's Note:**

> chapter titles from 'control' by halsey
> 
> this diverts from what happens in the movie- instead of lucille chasing edith after she’s killed thomas, lucille simply remains with his body and mourns while edith stays away in fear. basically, in my story, after murdering thomas, lucille does not fly into a rage but is instead dumbfounded and placated by her depression
> 
> this was written based on a prompt from angstmemes [on tumblr]: “of course i don’t want to kill you! i already have!”

 

 

_The letter opener had just been in her hand: a small thing she’d taken with the sole intention of frightening that stupid whore, Edith, into signing over her inheritance, just like she’d done with every other bitch Thomas had brought home as his legal wife._

_She had to hand it to the girl; though mewling and pathetic -just as every last one of them turned out to be toward the end- she had maintained some form of courage as she drove the fountain pen straight into Lucille’s upper chest with a cry of anguish. The pain had been blasphemous, something she hadn’t felt in so long it was almost refreshing to feel the blood spurting up out of the stab wound._

_Lucille had staggered back, her vision painted a bright red. In that moment, all she could think of was ending the bitch in front of her. Long blonde hair and light nightgown-clad, Edith was everything she wasn’t. A living polar opposite. Lucille had wanted her dead from the moment she laid eyes on her, but nothing compared to the thick, hot_ want _pulsating through her every cell to lunge forward and strangle the life out of her eyes._

_A quick death would be too merciful, she decided, laying beside the mirror and watching the young girl take flight through the halls, probably looking for Thomas with every intention of weeping at his feet and reciting the sob story of how his darling sister Lucille threatened her and confessed to murdering her father._

_What a surprise it would be when Thomas would have nothing to say except that he would have done the_ exact same thing _, down to the detail of revelling in the satisfying crunch Carter Cushing’s skull had made as it collided with the marble of the sink repeatedly, tearing his skin in beautiful ways and staining the floor in a beautiful dark crimson._

_What a surprise it would be when Thomas would laugh and secure an arm around his_ beloved _wife’s waist, not to embrace her in the reassuring manner she longed for, but to hold her firmly in place for Lucille to take her apart from the inside out._

_She’d start with her guts, perhaps, using her knives to rearrange the spools of her intestines and the positioning of her lower spine. Perhaps she’d even get creative with her kidneys and liver, if Edith stayed alive long enough to feel the excruciating pain it would cause. There was no fun in performing an autopsy; the best part was the screaming and begging. It was interesting to see what humans were reduced to when faced with intense pain._

_Pain was a relative thing, Lucille had learned. The more you could take, physically, the stronger you were. And the stronger you were, the more you could achieve and take for yourself. To be the devourer and not the consumed, you had to be strong. You had to be able to face death in the face and to laugh in a chagrin manner, to blow it a goddamn kiss._

_Willing herself to regenerate quicker, Lucille groped around for something to tug herself up with, but there was nothing that could withstand the force of her grip. Gritting her teeth and bringing herself to her feet with the balance of a toddler learning to walk, Lucille stood. Her hold on the letter opener never wavered, not once._

_And then, suddenly, Thomas was there, throwing the papers into the fire. Lucille’s mind seemed to spin, She felt disoriented with the burning sting of her shoulder and the way Thomas’ eyes weren’t focusing on any one thing. Weren’t focusing on_ her _._

_She seemed to be stuck in a place that was constantly ten seconds behind real time, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t keep up with the words slipping past Thomas’ lips and the frenzied, wild look in his eyes. Certain words lingered in the air beside her longer than the others. Words like ‘leave’ and ‘start a fresh life,’ that implied anything besides the truth that Lucille was willing to accept._

_“What?” She whispered, reaching out with a bloodied hand to cradle Thomas’ cheek. “What are you saying?_ Leave _?” Perhaps it was the aftermath of being stabbed that was getting to her, and she was hallucinating the whole thing. Thomas was there to comfort her, not shake the reality that her world had been built on._  

_With the confession that he’d broken his vow to her and fallen in love with Edith, someone other than Lucille, came two things Lucille had never felt before. The first, heartbreak. It was truly a terrifying thing to experience firsthand; Lucille felt as if her very heart would leap out of her chest to be crushed under Thomas’ shoe. The second, a bloodthirsty rage like nothing she’d ever felt before._

_It washed over her in quick splashes, like cold water on a warm, comfortable evening._ Wake up _, it screamed as pain and the desire to kill every breathing thing in the house bloomed in her chest._ Wake up and see what your silence has done to you _. She had been quiet as Thomas had brought Edith back to their home, and she had been quiet as Thomas had wedded and bedded Edith under the pretence of wanting her for anything but her money._

_Perhaps it was this fear of losing to her soundlessness that drove Lucille’s next actions, or perhaps it was a release of the wrath pooling in her belly. Either way, all she saw was red in the initial three seconds it took to plunge the blade in her hand into Thomas’ chest with enough force to puncture a lung or his very heart itself if she was lucky._

_(Why should his keep on beating for another if hers had gone cold and still while loving nobody but him?)_

_His expression twisted into one of pain and shock. He had obviously never in his wildest dreams thought that his sister, as devoted to him as she was, would lay a hand on him, let alone be the one to deliver him to his death._

_The wail that left her lips was animalistic as the knife was pulled out of the first stab wound and quickly driven into the next, also on his chest. Blood was pouring out of his chest by then, in steady rivers of blood as red as the clay that surrounded their house. The metallic smell of iron was rich in the air._

_It was fitting, Lucille supposed. Thomas had been born part of her home, and now he would die part of her home. They were tied together by a force unseen that even death would not break, and Thomas had been a fool to even begin to think of separating them from one another._

_With a final, trembling breath, Lucille retracted her blade and pushed it into Thomas’ face, below his eye and just above his left cheekbone. It was poetic justice, at the end of the day, that the final wound inflicted upon him be inflicted on his face. Lucille had always loved how handsome her baby brother was; he’d been an absolute delight to show off at parties as an infant, and when they’d grown older, exploring one another’s bodies in the dark of candlelight, just the sight of his face peeking up at her between her thighs was nearly enough to make her come._

_She left the blade lodged in his face, finally sinking back into the shadows of the musty room and feeling in her chest the true weight of what she’d done. Spider-like tingles ran all the way up her legs and the centre of her spine, and she began retching emptily into the air beside her._

_A little further ahead in the room, Thomas was pulling the blade out of his cheek muscles. Lucille wasn’t sure why: she knew that he was intelligent enough to know that it wouldn’t make a difference, that it wouldn’t do anything to help the fact that he was about to die._

_Oh, God, Thomas was about to die, and by her hand. By_ her _hand!_

_She saw the light flicker out of his eyes, saw the last wisp of his soul leave his broken, bloodied body. He looked at her with a forlorn expression, almost sad but not remorseful, as his weight sagged._

_Lucille sobbed, true cries wracking through her body like they hadn’t since she was sixteen and being beaten for the carnal relations with her brother she maintained. She pulled Thomas’ corpse onto her, not wanting anything but to feel his body atop hers. Yet, even as she tugged him onto her lap, it felt wrong. He was dead weight, and nothing at all like the Thomas who laughed liquid sunlight and whose eyes reflected the love she held in hers, all for him._

_She wasn’t sure how long she stayed that way, with his blood leaking out of his body and staining her gown until there was nothing left of his life force at all. Pain was relative. Time was relative. Everything could go fuck itself, her Thomas was gone._

 

 


	2. who is in control?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter takes place after the previous one, maybe a couple of days later

The mansion was cold. 

It always had been, due to its location, but this was a different sort of cold. It was a chill that never really left your bones; a blizzard that came and never left. The kind of cold that stuck around no matter how many layers of wool you wore, the kind that didn’t vanish even when the fireplace roared with life. 

It was especially frigid that day, but Lucille figured she was overdramatising the depth of the matter simply to pass the time that otherwise crawled by so slowly it stung. It was just… She could feel the cold, really _feel_ it, in all her five senses. She tasted the bitter pang in her mouth, felt the icicles pricking at underneath her skin, saw the way her fingertips turned to purple and to blue and to the white of the snow itself, heard the wind whispering coarse, ugly things, and smelled the treacherous red clay, freshened and moistened by the dense snow. 

Perhaps these sensations had been prominent before, and she just hadn’t noticed them. Why should she have? She had had her thick cashmere blankets, warm tea infused with exotic flavours imported especially for her, from the glory days of the Sharpes, and best of all; she had had her Thomas. 

The tears erupted as soon quickly as the thought of him had entered her mind. Why had she done what she did? She hadn’t meant to, she could swear the truth in front of any anointed priest. She hadn't meant to kill him, her actions had been driven solely by impulse and not at all by calculated thought. Had she had the chance to go through the motions once more, Lucille was sure she would’ve gone down a different path. 

Bargaining, perhaps, and negotiating with Thomas to ensure that he saw her side of the story. She’d convince him, through her affections and reasoning, that he didn’t need Edith, and that he wasn’t at all in love with Edith. All he needed was his Lucille and their home; there was nowhere else he could possibly want to go, no-one else he could possibly want to be with but her. 

She refused to consider the possibility of him still wanting to run away with the American slut who had ruined _everything_. But even if he did, slim chance that it was, Lucille wouldn’t kill him. She couldn’t afford to lose him, he was all that she had. 

The fire was dying out, and even with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders and the liquor in her hands, she was still cold. It didn’t help that the winter was one of the bleakest they’d endured, what with the windows frosting over and the wind hammering on the doors, demanding to be let in. That god-awful girl Edith was somewhere in the house, wailing about the love of her life being dead. 

What did she know about love? What, in her insignificant life, had she experienced to qualify her testimony of _love_? She had probably never been kissed, not really kissed, and she seemed exactly like the kind of girl to claim to have lost her virginity when really she’d never been touched by anyone other than her own fucking fingers. 

What did she know about having feelings, real feelings, for someone? What did she know about tossing and turning in agony at night, knowing that the love of your life was sleeping in another room with a strange woman who knew nothing about his favourite memory or the things that made him moan with pleasure, scream with delight? What the _hell_ did she know about love? 

Lucille’s grip tightened on the wineglass she held, so hard that the glass seemed to tremble to the point of shattering beneath her fingertips. The alcohol stung its way down her throat but did little to warm her insides the way she needed it to. She sniffed bitterly, the last of many tears clogging the back of her throat. 

When they’d gone to America in search of a young woman to drain of money and life, Lucille had been shocked and strangely enamoured at the overload of occult merchandise to be found at every corner. There were ouija boards, spiritual candles, psychic glasses and such, and for disgustingly cheap prices due to the exchange rate of their currency. 

Thomas had laughed at the items, declaring them childish and a distraction to their main purpose in the foreign land. He’d waved aside Lucille’s interest, silencing her with a gentle caress and a soft kiss. But her curiosity hadn’t been dimmed, and she’d purchased one of each of the novelty items just for fun on a day she had to spend alone while Thomas lounged around with the rich, young women of America, pretending to woo them and care for them. 

But now, sitting alone in the frigid room with nobody but herself to blame for the absence of her brother, the one she’d grown to love and live with, Lucille realised that perhaps it wasn’t such an immature spur-of-the-moment purchase that she’d made. 

Thrusting her wineglass down onto the table beside her armchair where she sat freezing in front of the fireplace, Lucille bolted from her chair and ran to the attic where all the mismatched, random items of the house lay forgotten. Some dated back to the past century or two, and some where fairly recent, like the things from America. The newest things seemed to be the most illuminated in the dusty, cobweb-ridden room that stank of mould and rotting wood, like they were the items to be found in a child’s activity colouring book. 

She brought the paper bag to the room she shared with Thomas between wives; the room where they could lay with one another without the fear of being discovered. It took all the courage she had, and even then, her steps trembled and her hands shook. Laying the items out on the edge of their bed, she placed the planchette onto the wooden ouija board last and let her fingers linger on its edge. 

The room reeked of evil with the cursed occult items laid in place. Their house had always been old, ancient, and full of spirits, some benevolent, and some wicked, that much Lucille knew, but this was a different kind of evil. It was heavy in the air, like the resounding song of a bell too old to sing. Her fingers shook on the planchette, and for a moment she considered shoving the items back into their cursed bag and hiding them from her own desperation.

Her resolve steeled at the fear thrumming steadily through her veins. Fear had caused her to lash out and to end the one relationship in her life that she’d been allowed to keep. She wouldn’t fall prey to it again. Resuming her actions, she released a breath she hadn’t known herself to be holding. 

“Thomas,” the name sounded wrong on her tongue, “Thomas, are you… Here?” It sounded terribly wrong, the way the words rolled off her lips. In the past, she’d never had to ask him which room of the house he was in, or which wing of the mansion he was residing in. She’d just always _known_. 

The air in the room stiffened considerably, and Lucille sat up straight purely by instinct, like a cat smelling something sour. Without any further indication that there was a spirit in the room, the planchette jerked sharply to the ‘yes’ feature on the left edge of the board. 

Lucille gasped, feeling the air knocked out of her lungs. She withdrew her hand from the board, though the movement was temporary. Her fingers, twitching gingerly, laid themselves back onto the planchette just in time to feel its urgent movement toward the letters splayed out across the wood. 

… W … H … Y … 

An instant laugh, mad and barked out and utterly inappropriate, left her lips. It was such a _Thomas_ thing to ask. Even as a child, he’d always been so deeply interested in the mechanics behind the workings, while Lucille was satisfied to keep her eyes on the glittery front pages. 

“Why?” She repeated, her tone clearly rhetorical, “Why, what? Why is it that the sun is still burning in the despicable sky, why your lousy bride’s heart still beats… While yours doesn’t?” She waited for the planchette to move again, refusing to say anything more until Thomas (or whatever was speaking in his place) reviewed his question more specifically. 

… L … A … S … T … …O … N … E …

It was so straightforward, without the flowery language she was so used to him using no matter the situation, that it seemed to force an answer out of her. 

“You gave me no choice,” she said defensively, her tone cutting off any and all emotion that might betray her before breaking into a somewhat meek nod of acceptance. “But you are correct, I- it was my fault as much as it was yours.”

… I … … W … A … S … … I … N … N … O … C … E … N … T …

The reply took a while, and it was dreadfully slow to watch the little wooden triangle sweep across the board. It was anything but the answer Lucille had expected: Thomas hadn’t ever been one to wallow in self-righteousness. 

Surely death didn’t change people so. 

“You broke your vow! You broke the one vow you shouldn’t have broken!” The accusations that left her throat were dry and hoarse and scratchy, but they were true. 

… I … … F … E … L … L … … I … N … … L … O … V … E … 

Lucille didn’t reply. She had nothing to say. Hadn’t _she_ been his love? What utter nonsense he was spouting, about falling in love- he was already in love, with _her_! Heartbreak the first time around had been worse than a fate as terrible as death, but this wasn’t any less painful. He had already broken her chest, why did he insist on carelessly stepping on its shards?

She thought about it, as thoroughly as she could bear to, and when there was nothing left for her to say, she took her fingers off the planchette. Her hand felt stiff: her fingers frozen and locked in place of the crooked way they'd been resting on the wooden board. There was nothing left to feel, and yet she still felt empty. 

The atmosphere in the room had all but frozen over, and Lucille suddenly realised how cold it truly was. She went to light a set of candles to guide her way back down to the main hall with the biggest fireplace, and only when she felt a drop of water on her hand did she realise she was crying. It was so utterly ridiculous and stupid, how she’d already lost everything she had and still, he was everywhere but in her grasp. 

What had she hoped to achieve by killing the one person who understood her, who knew her in his marrow and in the deepest pits of his being? Thinking about it only spurred the sadness into something else, something more malign. Her grip on the candle tightened until she was just holding crushed wax. If she’d meant to keep him closer to her in death, it was a disappointment to find that Thomas was still adamant about his feelings for someone who wasn’t her. 

Upon starting the fire, Lucille set the candlestick onto the top of her piano. It was the item she loved most in the house; the one thing she couldn’t live without. But in that moment, all she wanted to do was set its wooden frame ablaze and smash each and every one of its ivory keys. But she knew, unfortunately, that she’d regret it later on, and so instead she turned her back on it and sat on her knees in front of the fire. 

The direct heat warmed her, but the cold ache remained set in place in her bones. She shuddered, pulling her garments closer around her and absentmindedly rubbing her hands together. She wasn’t sure how much time passed, but when Lucille next looked away from the flames licking at the thick logs of wood that fed it, the mansion was gloomy with the curtain of nightfall sweeping over it. 

At that point in the day, Lucille’s usual routine consisted of locking any open windows and doors in the lower floors to ensure any overnight drafts stayed out and didn’t contribute to the continuous rotting of their home. But that day, she didn’t feel like it: she didn’t feel like doing anything but mourning the loss of her kin

_“Lucille_.”

Her name gushed through the empty airspace above her, rushing through the rafters and open patch of the roof. There was no real weight in the way the word was carried,and yet it was so real, so palpable. 

“ _Lucille, turn around.”_

Any smart person in her shoes would have agreed that in the event of receiving an instruction from a bodiless voice, the worst thing to do would be to follow that order. Lucille considered it for a moment, before deciding to go against the thought. Every ‘smart’ decision she’d made, whether on behalf of their dying family name and fortune or of her own interest had ended in carnage and the loss of life; including the final death of her brother.

Swivelling around at a dizzying speed, Lucille felt all the warmth accumulated from her time in front of the fire disappear. Thomas was standing in front of her, in the vest and shirt he’d been wearing. The wounds she’d inflicted on him were open, and seemingly bleeding out into the air around him in thin, crimson wisps. His eyes were sad, and his posture defeated. His clothes appeared to be rusted and torn in places they had been finely stitched before, and his overall image was miles away from the handsome, fine man he’d been alive. 

It wasn’t Thomas. It couldn’t have been. Lucille had simply been messing with occult items more powerful than she’d deemed, and now she was paying the price. It was all a joke, it wasn’t real, it couldn’t be-

“ _Hello, Lucille._ ”

“Thomas,” his name left her lips in a whisper like an urgent prayer, and before she was fully aware of what she was doing, Lucille was falling forward onto the figure of her brother, her arms outreached and ready to wrap around him, to hold him the way she was accustomed to. 

Her knees hit the floor with a painful thud and a dull ache. Her arms closed around nothing. He was gone, or maybe he hadn’t truly been there in the first place. Maybe she was hallucinating- wasn’t that a stage of acceptance? 

“ _I’m still here, Lucille.”_

The voice was his, she was sure of it now: it had the same lilting tone he used only with her. Rising to her feet, Lucille spun around again and again, looking for Thomas but to no avail. She grit her teeth, frustrated with how the situation was unfolding utterly out of her control. “Stop this game,” she demanded between breaths. 

“ _Was my_ love _a game to you, sweet sister?_ ” 

The question knocked Lucille off balance. “Of course it isn’t,” she hissed through a clenched jaw, not bothering to correct the incorrect tense of her speech. “Where are you?” She was unable to stop the desperate cry in which her words rang out. She just needed to see him, just needed to know that he still existed in some form. 

As if answering her implicated prayer, the wavering image of Thomas, bloodied but himself appeared once more. His mouth was set in a grim line and his lips pursed. All Lucille could do was stare, brokenly, at the figure of the man she had loved and murdered. 

God, why had she killed everything she loved? What had she become? She knew of love, and how it made monsters of everyone it tainted, but she’d never realised just how corrupted her love had become. Thomas was a perfect example of it, as was the child she’d longed for, only to suffocate in hatred when it lay crying and deformed. 

“ _What are you thinking of? Are you wishing you hadn’t done this to me?_ ”

Not only were his words harsh, but the rigidness in his posture and the definite clamp of his jaw proved that Thomas (or what was left of him, at the very least) was bitter about his untimely death. 

He had every right to be, Lucille knew, but she still found it unfair that he was angry about it. It had been _his_ fault in the first place. _He_ had been the one to fall in love with someone who wasn’t her, _he_ had been the one to betray her. He’d provoked her into doing what she had. 

With all that in mind, Lucille found it in herself to shake her head. “I’m glad I did this to you. I saved you from yourself,” Lucille spat, dangerously close to breaking into sobs. She had trained herself to be a brilliant actress; to never show her true emotions, and yet her words sounded like the lies they were. 

’Til death do you part, the wedding vows had been, and yet here he was, dead and continuing to choose someone else over her.

“ _Would you do it again?_ ”

The words caused Lucille to flinch violently, and suddenly she was back in the attic with Thomas, hearing his declaration of love for Edith all over again. He’d promised to never love anyone but her, and he’d gone back on his word shamelessly. She saw herself taking a step back, unable to process his words, and then she saw herself plunging the letter opener into his chest. Once, twice, and then into his cheek. As if she needed to see it again. She could still feel the slippery liquid of his blood on her fingertips and the weight of his unmoving body atop hers. 

“ _Would you kill me again?_ ”

Lucille remembered the terror she’d felt as she watched the light fade out of his eyes, like she was watching every memory they had together dissipate into thin air. Like she’d erased everything they’d built together. 

She didn’t realise it, but her hands had begun to shake somewhat uncontrollably. In an attempt to soothe her fraying nerves, she clenched her hands into fists and bit her tongue. Her knees felt as if they might buckle at any given moment and send her tumbling onto the unforgiving floor beneath her feet. 

“ _You look angry, Lucille,_ ” this time his voice was mocking, “ _Are you thinking of killing me now? To rid yourself of these memories you don’t want to keep._  

It was too much for her. Lucille let out a piercing scream, “ **Of course I don’t want to kill you, I already have**!” Tears threatened to spill from her lashes as she swallowed back lumps of bile and saliva. Lashing out at the ghostly figure of Thomas, who was now the opposite of everything she used to love about him, she watched him disappear, his form thinning out like fog after a heavy rain.  

He had become cold, when he used to be warm and her main source of heat in their freezing skeleton of a home. His laugh, polite yet entirely indecent in the way it made arousal stir in her stomach, had turned inhuman and ghastly. She didn’t even want to think of how he might differ in terms of the other features about him that she’d loved. 

And then she was alone, alone with her regrets and thoughts of what might’ve been had the wretched American not entered their lives. That had been the start of their downfall, Lucille decided. It hadn’t been her. 

She didn’t think she could live with the blame on her shoulders, and so it was important to heap the blame onto someone or something else, or else she thought she might actually go mad. And that wouldn’t do. Not when she had to stay alive, had to keep the Sharpe mansion and name in order. Not when the ghosts in the house were aching to get their hands on her own bloodstained fingers.

Not when her own ghosts threatened to strangle her in her sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> i confess i’m not sure if lucille killed thomas with a letter opener or something else so if i’m wrong with that, or any of the details pls do let me know!! i hope you liked this piece, i put a lot of soul into writing it


End file.
